The Hardcore Diaries (21 page)

Courtesy of Dee Snider.

“Well,” I said, “you know Dee’s been really busy. They’re getting the band back together for a USO tour in Korea.”

“I guess,” Brian said.

Hell, I couldn’t make the poor kid wait any longer. It would be tantamount to torture. So I excused myself, saying something about having forgotten something in the hallway.

“Oh…my…God!” Brian said when I returned, upon seeing just what it was I’d forgotten. “It’s Dee Snider.”

Over the last twenty years, I’ve been involved in some pretty good entrance reactions. But this was among the finest for me, because even though Dee was the recipient of the adulation, I felt responsible for its existence.

Dee sat down at Brian’s bedside and proceeded to talk for an hour, maybe more, about the glory days of Twisted Sister; the music, the videos, the lawsuits, the verbal smackdown of Tipper Gore.

He wasn’t just going through the motions, showing up because it was in his contract, like that guy in the ESPN series
Playmakers,
who swiped kids’ pain medication while he was in their room. I heard a rumor that Rush Limbaugh used to pull the same sleight of hand when he visited hospitals to brighten the spirits of young bedridden conservatives. Just kidding—I doubt Rush Limbaugh visits kids in the hospital.

Dee and I headed home, stopping first at his favorite bakery so he could arrive with warm fresh muffins for the hungry Snider clan. I pulled up the drive and stopped the car, and Dee playfully punched me on the shoulder, saying, “Thanks a lot, man,” before getting out. But as I backed out of the drive, I saw Dee stop and put his arm out, signaling me not to leave just quite yet. I rolled down the window as he slowly approached. Actually, I just pushed a button and the window went down, but I think you get the point. Once at the door’s side, looking into the window, Dee seemed somehow different. A man who usually exuded self-confidence seemed to be uncomfortable, almost shy, as he struggled for words.

“I just want to thank you,” he finally said. “For helping to make me a better man.”

As I drove home, reliving the day’s events in my mind, I realized the significance of Dee’s words. After all, I was no longer just a three-time WWE Champion. I was no longer just a two-time
New York Times
best-selling author. No longer was I just a guy who’d been interviewed—twice—by Katie Couric. Now, in addition to those previous accolades, I will forever proudly consider myself to be the guy who made Dee Snider a better man.

May 23, 2006
12:08
A
.
M
. West Coast time—
Pasadena, CA

Dear Hardcore Diary,

I pulled into an Extended Stay America about half an hour ago, and after discovering that the air-conditioning wasn’t working in the first room, and finding out my key didn’t open the door of my second room, I finally settled into a semi-comfortable room that may or may not be my home for the next three nights. I say “may” because basically the chair at the tiny desk makes my orange Worcester Centrum folding chair seem like a king’s throne, and I just don’t know if putting my 315-pound body on it for extended periods of writing seems like the wisest idea.

The next two days are designated writing days. I’d like to put in a minimum of ten hours a day into the writing, pausing only to eat, sleep, and work out. I’m determined to have
Hardcore Diaries
finished by a day or two after the
One Night Stand
show, but I have to continue to work out, so as not to have a cardiovascular debacle to write about. I worry that everything will fall into place except my conditioning, causing the
Diaries
to fall victim to a flat ending.

Because, let’s face it—we need a hell of a match to really make the book. Otherwise, it’s like Ralphie not getting the Red Ryder BB gun on Christmas morning, or Rocky losing the big fight to Creed. Wait a second, he did lose that fight. But at least he didn’t gas out and stink the place up. At least he still had the energy to call out for his pet-shop girlfriend, even while the judge’s scorecards were determining his fate.

But honestly, even if my conditioning is not what it should be, we’ll probably have enough bells, whistles, and extracurricular activity to put on a good show at
One Night Stand.
Plus, the atmosphere should be unbelievable. But I’ve just been asked (yesterday) about my feelings on wrestling Ric Flair at
Vengeance
only two weeks later.

I’m not against it on principle, as I was two years ago following the publication of his book, which wasn’t exactly a glowing testimonial to the hardcore legend. But I am worried about how my body will react to the rigors of the ECW show, and how quickly I’ll be able to bounce back for the fast-moving, intense matchup that the Flair match really needs to be.

I’ve found that it’s really tough to simulate an in-ring pace with any piece of cardio equipment; it’s just a completely different feeling. I pretty much told Gewirtz and Michael Hayes that I’d probably be limited to tag teams or hardcore-type matches, which are easier for me to set the pace on. But this proposed Flair match does make sense, especially if he decides to get involved in our match at
One Night Stand.

Vengeance
is in Charlotte, Flair’s hometown, where he’s like the unofficial mayor. So it should be another great atmosphere, provided, of course, that I don’t use up all the oxygen in the building. And provided that my knee holds out. Right now, it feels like it’s hanging on by a thread. I’m pretty sure it’s the left posterior cruciate ligament. I had the right one replaced with a cadaver (dead person) tendon back in ’92, but it tore again in 2004 following the
Backlash
match with Randy Orton. Injuries to the posterior ligament are rare, so I could be something of a medical marvel should I be without both of them.

I’ve got an MRI scheduled in a couple of days in L.A., which should help me figure out which plan of action to take for conditioning and match preparation. The pain has been getting gradually worse, to the point just getting into and out of the car is a considerable struggle.

It looks like Melina will be coming over to
Raw,
following her
SmackDown!
“firing” by general manager Theodore Long at last night’s
Judgment Day
Pay-Per-View. I wish I knew more. Hopefully she’ll be coming with Nitro & Mercury, her tag team, as one of them (Nitro) is her boyfriend. Should she arrive solo, I’d feel greatly responsible for the breakup of the team, as I can’t help but feel it was my proposed scenario that led to the
Judgment Day
results. I don’t want to break up a team or put strain on a relationship, no matter how good an idea I have.

Relationships within wrestling are rough—the success ratio is not encouraging. I had a failed one of my own back in 1988, with a wrestler twelve years my senior. She’d wrestled all over the world, and was far more accomplished than I was—a fact that dipped into my already shallow supply of self-confidence. As a result, I was pretty miserable for most of our two months together, although I must confess to reacting quite favorably to my initiation into the world of dirty talking—a dish she served up quite nicely with her sexy Australian accent and imaginative choice of words.

May 23, 2006
9:40
A
.
M
.—Pasadena, CA

Dear Hardcore Diary,

Well, I called several of the hotels in the area, and they are all sold out, so I may end up checking out and moving out of Pasadena, somewhere closer to Glendale, where the upcoming Christy Canyon interview will take place. As you could probably guess, Colette is not exactly thrilled with the prospect of that one.

Last night’s
Raw
went very well, although it didn’t feature the definitive Paul E./Mick Foley verbal toe-to-toe I had been anticipating. Which is probably good, because last night’s segment did an excellent job of setting up the actual match, and left the Vegas crowd awash in an enthusiastic chorus of ECW chants.

Much to my surprise, I’m actually a bad guy now. I had assumed that some people would boo me, but figured my ultra loyalty to WWE would keep people on my side for a while. Sure, some of the fans were cheering, and there was a subdued but noticeable “Foley” chant when I came out, but I guess I need to accept that I am now a wrestling heel—at least for a while. The truth is, I could probably take my six months off after
SummerSlam
and return to a babyface reaction, as if nothing had ever happened. After all, guys like Undertaker have been heavy heels, and come back after extended breaks to huge babyface reactions. But for the sake of successful storytelling, I want to have a sense of cohesion and logic to my departure and eventual return. And hey, if the return can generate interest in this book, then so be it.

Extended Stay America was nice enough to bring me a padded office chair, so it looks like I’ll be staying a while. The poor chair—it’s about to become better acquainted with my ass than anything, living or material, really deserves to. Maybe it’s not the rustic log cabin where so many writers seem to do their best work, but then again, it’s not an airplane or the front seat of a broken-down car, where I wrote part of the Uncle Dee chapter.

Unlike last week, I don’t have a videotape handy to offer word-for-word promo analysis. Besides, this was a very good but not historic or particularly emotional promo, and I don’t want to get so in-depth all the time that you guys are actually skipping over these “promo” entries in order to get to more Diva stories. Still, it was a very good segment, and an integral piece of the bigger puzzle, so utilizing the powers of recall that hundreds of chair shots haven’t yet stolen, here’s what went down last night, right there in Las Vegas.

Oddly, I didn’t show up at the Thomas and Mack Center raring to go. This West Coast
Raw
still throws me off. It just doesn’t seem right to go live in the middle of daylight. It had been a few days since I’d spent any substantial time in Promoland, and I’d already let the image of the “hardway promo” drift from my mind, accepting, I guess, that it just wasn’t going to happen this time around. Besides, trying to tie the eye injury into
SummerSlam,
as I hope to do, is a bit of a stretch. Three months is an awful long amount of lead time for what I have planned. Maybe a hardway at
One Night Stand
would work better, as it could be seen in all its gory glory the following night on
Raw,
allowing it to become part of the Flair match buildup, before continuing on to
SummerSlam.

It continues to cross my mind that writing a book is not the best way to fire oneself up for such an emotional match as ECW’s promises to be. Maybe there’s just not enough hours in a day to write, hit the gym, be a father to four children, and make daily sojourns to Promoland as well. I don’t want to burn myself out too soon emotionally, as I may have done at
WrestleMania XX.
But it is a distinct possibility.

Whore
and
balls
are a major concern. Can we say them (repeatedly, in
whore
’s case) at the nine o’clock (ET) hour? Just to be safe, we decide that Paul E. will go with
prostitute
and
nuts
. Paul’s central theme will involve labeling me as a prostitute. Hey, I give him credit—he can’t be charged with making claims in private that he’s not willing to make in front of millions around the world.

I’ve always gotten along with Paul E., and had until recently considered him a good friend, but as I’ve come to realize and accept, there are very few real friends in wrestling. Lots of business relationships, lots of friendly acquaintances, but very few friends. But whatever disappointment or hurt I felt at discovering his opinion of me, it can’t tarnish Paul’s legacy as one of the most creative, incredibly gifted minds I’ve encountered in our business. We can definitely do business together, even if business will often involve what Terry Funk calls “borderlining,” coming very close to what you really feel and mean about an individual.

Paul made it very clear that nothing is off the table as far as his life is concerned. I can say anything I want to. But Brian Gewirtz has assured me that we will get to that previously mentioned definitive Foley/Heyman promo. Oh, yeah, for those of you who don’t know, Paul E. and Paul Heyman are the same guy, and the two names will be used interchangeably. But my feeling is that now is not the time to address Paul’s changes. We’ll let them stew in the minds of fans, let them try to figure it out, before I give my side of the story.

Basically, I plan to paint ECW as a fanatic cult, a latter-day Jonestown, if you will. Paul is the charismatic cult leader, the Jim Jones of ECW, lording over his naive, trusting flock of hardcore wrestlers. Why shouldn’t they have been loyal? After all, most of them were guys who’d bounced around the independents for years, seemingly going nowhere, when Paul breathed new life into their careers. The guys worked their butts off, don’t get me wrong, but Paul E. was the maestro, conducting an eclectic blend of bloodshed, humor, emotion, and good old-fashioned ingenuity into a symphony of hardcore entertainment. During its heyday, it blew away what WCW and WWE had to offer.

It was fresh, it was exciting, and it did wonders for the careers of many, especially those for whom it served as a conduit, a way to get noticed by the big boys—guys like Eddie Guerrero, Chris Benoit, and Dean Malenko, who were something of anomalies in ECW. They were actually
wrestlers,
having
wrestling
matches, which stood out amid the potpourri of weapons, blood, and bad language that was the staple of the ECW diet.

The company also served as a creative springboard for so many, myself included. Paul E. didn’t script interviews, he nurtured them. He was like a father figure in that way; bringing out the best in his children simply by believing in them, by giving them the room to grow. I grew immensely under Paul E.’s guidance. Stone Cold Steve Austin did as well, as did many others who were fortunate to have called ECW their home, if only for a little while.

But I never drank the Kool-Aid, although I did come mighty close. WWE, at that time, was not even a possibility for me. Jim Ross had been pulling for me for years. Nothing. I called the WWE offices once a year on principal. Nothing. I had even thought about calling WCW and offering my services, as a strictly TV performer. By combining my ECW, Japan, and prospective WCW bookings, I could have made a pretty good living for my family.

My bread and butter was Japan, where by engaging in incredibly physical matches with Terry Funk, I was becoming something of a minor cult hero. WCW might have been some gravy for the bread, although in all likelihood I would have been used up, beaten, and discarded quickly by the group. But my heart belonged to ECW. Until I saw it for what it really was—a dead end.

I had the glass of Kool-Aid right up to my lips. I saw Paul E. smiling contentedly, another soul for him to keep, another career gone for good. You guys do realize I’m speaking metaphorically here, right? There really wasn’t any Kool-Aid there, unless of course the Sandman had poured a quart of vodka into it.

The “Cane Dewey” sign is usually seen as the defining moment in my ECW career. Before the sign, everything was good. After the sign, I saw things a little clearer. “Cane Dewey” was a sign held up by a fan that seemed to encourage the “caning,” or beating with a kendo stick, of my then-three-year-old son, Dewey. I knew it was meant as a joke, and had even told the “sign guy” who made it that it was okay to show it. But the sign made my wife physically sick to her stomach, and served as the catalyst for my ECW heel turn, which is still spoken of reverently in wrestling lore.

But it was actually an incident involving longtime Philadelphia-based indy wrestler J. T. Smith that affected me more. I’d known J.T. for years and thought he was a heck of a guy, although he seemed intent on wrestling a style that his body just wasn’t made to handle. He liked the wild stuff, the big, high-impact bumps, which always seemed to leave him in incredible pain. But man, he would have done anything to please the fans, including risking his life. Eventually, he found love in ECW in a comedy role as wrestling’s first full-blooded Italian black man. His biggest impact on my life, however, was the time he slipped off the top rope at the ECW arena (Viking Hall) and crashed headfirst to the concrete floor below.

Back in my ECW days.

His head swelled up immediately, dangerously so, maybe even life-threateningly so. But that didn’t stop the ECW faithful from reveling in his pain. “You f’d up, you f’d up,” they chanted, over and over. But as you can probably guess, they didn’t just say the first initial. I was really pretty stunned. Sickened. Because in that one moment, I realized that ECW was a dead end—that to stay any longer than necessary would be the death of my career.

For me, it all comes back to just where my life would be if I’d listened to ECW fans who chanted, “You sold out,” upon learning of my imminent defection to WWE. If I’d listened to good friends who said WWE would be the death of my career. Or even Paul E., who warned me that my program with Undertaker would be “a dead deal.” Where exactly would I be? Broken down, bitter, probably divorced, possibly penniless, and looking at WWE’s proposed new ECW brand as a life-saving measure.

All right, maybe that’s melodramatic. I probably could have done wild matches in Japan for years and lived a fairly decent life. Or perhaps gotten out of wrestling completely, and had the intestinal fortitude to actually make my way in the real world. And I’ve often considered my final ECW match, with its completely unexpected hero’s farewell, to be a highlight of my career. I really did love so much about ECW. So it was a love/hate relationship that for Pay-Per-View purposes I will only be dwelling on the hate side of.

But I’ll go out on a limb and say that most of what I have has been made possible through my experiences with WWE. And no, this is not a blind tribute to the philanthropic nature of Vince McMahon. I was given an opportunity, and I made the most of it. I paid a price, and I was paid a price for doing so.

But there would be no
Hardcore Diaries
without WWE. No
Have a Nice Day,
no
Foley Is Good,
no children’s books, no novels. I’ve had my share of battles with Vince McMahon, and I’m sure I’ll have more in the future. Maybe Vince only gave me the ball and I did the running, but at least I was running somewhere with it—not on a path to nowhere, like so many of ECW’s finest ball carriers.

Good stuff, done really well, makes for great TV. Good stuff, done decently, makes for forgettable TV. I thought the stuff we had was really good, and I knew we had the potential to do it really well, so I wasn’t all that worried about the finer comparisons of
whore
and
prostitute
and
balls
and
nuts.
It was going to be good. So what if I didn’t know my lines? I could make it up while I was out there. We’d be fine.

And we were. I came out to a far more mixed reaction than a week ago. Very cool. Once inside the ring, which I had considerable trouble actually getting into (I know my knee is bad when I have to push off the ropes to stand up), I informed the fans that there had been a misunderstanding, that I was actually a good guy, letting parents know it was okay to give their kids permission to cheer me.

“After all,” I said, “I’m the cuddly guy, the human Muppet, the guy who puts his thumb up in the air and says, ‘It’s great to be in Vegas!’” A big, cheap pop. Sure not everyone is buying into it, but enough are to make the next line work.

“Except it’s not really that great to be here in Las Vegas.”

I then explained the problem I had with millions of people attempting to change their lives with a lucky hand at cards or roll of the dice, instead of working hard for their accomplishments, like I had. After all, I hadn’t won three WWE championships by rolling sevens on the craps tables, or written two
New York Times
number-one best-selling books by putting a quarter in a slot machine. I’d earned them.

I then introduced a man who had earned everything in his life as well, Edge. Edge then came out to participate in a major-league schmoozefest, during which I presented him with the old hardcore title, in recognition of him truly embodying the spirit of hardcore. Edge declined the title, claiming that I was the more deserving of it, for having toiled in obscurity for so long in ECW, and for tolerating the words of a so-called legend like Ric Flair, who had referred to me as a “glorified stuntman” in his aforementioned book. So the first seed of the Flair match had been planted.